Top Heavy & Fat Bottomed

Ask any successful businessman; in times of financial stress you need to get lean.

You need to flatten your organization and make sure that what resources are available are dedicated to income producing efforts. You have to determine what are the least value-added items and thin those out.

A sure sign of a dysfunctional organization that is in denial, is one where under financial stress, they grow their upper management and hire excess non-income producing staff; usually to support not the operational, "income" producing personnel - but the bloated higher management.

In the military, it is the uniformed personnel who are your "value added" personnel producing "income." You can deploy them, they are usually lower cost (unless they are in the chop the chopped chop in the chop-chain Staffs).It is the company and field grade officers who lead Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, and Marines (yes Coasties too...) that are what you need to focus on keeping relative to others.

DoD gets that, right? Well, nosomuch.

The Pentagon’s civilian workforce, which expanded dramatically during President Obama’s first three years, is not facing any significant reductions even as the Defense Department is slashing ground troops by more than 10 percent, retiring ships and combat planes, and putting off the purchases of some new weapons.President Bush’s last budget, for fiscal 2009, pegged Defense Department civilians at 739,000, according to the department’s latest “Green Book” budget document on total spending.This year, the number of civilians sits at 801,000, an increase of 62,000 personnel, or 8 percent; it is expected to decline by 1 percent next year....the Pentagon’s 801,000 civilians exceed the combined size of the active-duty Navy and Air Force.The civilian workforce is even larger when the department’s 766,000 private contractors — many added during the George W. Bush years — are counted. Together, this civilian force exceeds the uniformed active force by more than 150,000.

Civilians constipate and bind the system from being able to move and adjust compared to uniformed personnel. The largest reason? Of course,

... because of federal rules, “the problem with reducing civilians is you can’t fire anyone. The only way to do it is not to replace them.”

Another reason why the only place in the country that has not fallen into recession is the 1-hr commute arch from DC.We need different and better civilian leadership with a mandate and a broad-axe - the Congressional top-cover to use it.

Again; PLAN SALAMANDER for the Navy (other services do what they want) - get a half-dozen post-Command Commanders, half as many Admin-LCO LCDRs led by an angry 29.5 yr Bull-Captain with A LOT of Command at Sea time who wants nothing but to retire to a hundred acres in the wilds of Alabama with his dog, double-wide and Kubota; lock them in a compound with a few trailers with full NIPR access, a high speed printer, 1,000 sqft of white-board, Vietnam-era surplus coffee, a CSCS, three CS3, a YNC, a 19-yr BM1/MA1, and a stack of manning documents.Tell them to cut, flatten, and make you angry. Go after Shore and Staff until it hurts and if "things can't be done without XXXXX" - then rack-and-stack those "things" in order of priority. You can keep 10% of them.The Bull-Captain reports to a Civilian who reports directly to SECNAV. They have 30-days. No interim briefs or updates. No D&G requests. Just an outbrief on day-31. No more than 50 single-panel PPT slides. Hey - got a better plan? What we're doing ain't working folks.